Sheriff spending down for first time in a decade

All county departments were asked last month to submit a plan to cut 10 percent from their budgets. Those plans, now released by the county budget office, show that Sheriff Adrian Garcia has asked for an increase.

There is simply no way to cut another $40 million from a department that is already down 10 percent from the number of employees it had when a countywide hiring freeze went into effect in September 2009, said sheriff’s spokesman Alan Bernstein.

“Layoffs? We’ve had them. The budget office just calls them a hiring freeze,” Bernstein said. The department had 90 vacancies at the time of the freeze, and an additional 333 employees have left the department without being replaced since the freeze went into effect.

The document submitted to the budget office indicates that Garcia will make his case for an exemption from the cuts based on the job he has done reining in runaway spending in his department’s budget.

For the first time in at least a decade, the sheriff projects that his department will spend less in this fiscal year than it did last year. In the four years before Garcia took office in 2009, sheriff’s spending increased by 65 percent. Garcia slowed it to 4.5 percent in his first year in office, and now projects he will have decreased it by nearly 5 percent ($21 million) this fiscal year.

Garcia proposes a budget of $415 million for the fiscal year that begins on March 1.

Garcia is not the only department head that failed to submit a 10 percent cut plan. But the sheriff’s office is by far the largest expense in the county’s $1.3 billion budget.

Though Garcia can make the case that he has put the brakes on increases, he still can’t make his annual budget. This year he’ll likely exceed his budget by $28 million.

This year’s budget was predicated on criminal justice reforms reducing the jail population. There are some signs of success from those reforms, but they haven’t reduced the number of inmates enough to put a stop to Harris County exporting prisoners to Louisiana and to other Texas counties. In addition, the hiring freeze paradoxically increases payroll costs. The shortage of staff means huge overtime bills, the sheriff says, as deputies work extra hours to cover shifts that could be covered by an employee working on straight time if the department were fully staffed.

Garcia warns in his budget report: “The use of overtime will increase due to the attrition of detention personnel.”